Click "Accept": Exploring justification & responsibility in unravelling the ‘privacy paradox’

In 2018, global media coverage of data privacy issues peaked in the wake of successive Facebook and Google privacy scandals. As state and corporate actors engaged in discourse on the issue, individual actors, or the 'user class', were left out. In light of traditional privacy research, this was understandable, as individuals have historically demonstrated inconsistencies in their attitudes and behaviours surrounding data privacy. This phenomenon is the privacy paradox, wherein users express concerns for the privacy of their data but regularly act or behave in ways that undermine or fail to protect it. However, is this the whole story? Moreover, in an era of increased technological penetration and decreasing privacy, can users afford to be silent within a potentially false paradox? This thesis argues that the privacy paradox is a result of reductionist approaches to the study of privacy and aims to demonstrate that user conceptualisations surrounding data privacy are not as paradoxical as supposed. Through the construction of a context-integrity framework, integrated with an analytical application of regimes of justification, consistent patterns of contextual influence within user data privacy conceptualisations were exposed. Identified via semi-structured interviews (n=20) with Dutch and American individual users these patterns proved to be coherent, measurable, and predictable across contexts, surpassing the limitations of traditional reductionist measures that fail to reconcile user attitudes and behaviours. This research contributes to an enhanced understanding of complex, norm-sensitive issues such as data privacy, increasingly relevant when technological and corporate influences on privacy norms are steadily increasing.